This week’s Smart Health roundup features a smart band that energizes and relaxes, soaring Fitbit shares thanks to an expected rise in consumer interest, the NIH’s plans to tap into wearable tech data in support of a White House initiative, and new designs demonstrating how wearables could one day replace or support biological functions.

Doppel’s performance-enhancing wearable tech

Feeling tired all day but can’t sleep when you need to? You may just need to condition your body with the help of Doppel, a wearable device that can make you naturally feel more relaxed or alert on demand using rhythmic pulsing on the inside of the wrist.

Doppel uses a double beat pulse that our body reacts to. You can stroke the face of the device to slow down the rhythm of the beat, press the center of the device to increase the beat, and rotate the rim to increase the intensity of the beat. The slower and milder the pulse, the more relaxed you’ll feel; the stronger and faster the beat, the more focused you’ll be.

To set up Doppel, first take your resting heart rate first to calibrate the device. You do this via a companion app that is used to adjust base settings. You can also use the app to save multiple rhythms, such as one for exercise, sleep, relaxing and work, and send these rhythms to Doppel when you need it.

You can fund Doppel on Kickstarter, Inc. Expect the device to start shipping by 2016.

Fitbit shares hit 100% increase from IPO price

Fitbit Inc. recently debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FIT and exceeded expectations when its shares traded 48.4 percent higher, at $29.68, than its initial public offering price of $20 per share, and now it has more than doubled that price.

According to reports, Fitbit shares hit $42.15 on July 7, marking a 100 percent increase from its IPO price. The spike in Fitbit’s shares is influenced by predictions that the wearable tech market will significantly increase in production and usage in the next few years. Also, Fitbit holds 85 percent of the U.S. market share in Q1, with global shares estimated at 34 percent.

According to William Power, an analyst with Robert W. Baird, “Fitbit’s early success was driven by very basic activity trackers in one’s pocket or on the wrist.” He continues, “The latest product, the Surge, which was introduced in December 2014, retails for $250, and includes GPS in addition to the all of the previous activity and heart rate measurements.” Baird also mentions that Fitbit’s global expansion “represents a significant opportunity for the company.”

NIH to tap into wearable tech data, learn about patients

Earlier this year, President Barack Obama announced the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) which is a more focused approach in learning more about patients so better treatment can be delivered. Now, as part of PMI, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants to use the data being gathered by smartphones and wearable tech to learn more about patients.

The NIH believes that smartphones and wearables can provide the ability to track “health behaviors and environmental exposures much more frequently with minimal burden on participants,” which basically means that they can get patient data even with little input from the patient themselves.

Smartphones and wearables can obtain data such as location information to help them assess how environmental factors may be affecting the patient’s health. Wearables are able to collect patient vitals such as heart rate and temperature, and smartphones can connect participants to a study which may ensure adhesion to home instructions. Although tapping into data from wearables and smartphones may make the NIH’s job a bit easier, they still need to address the issue of privacy.

What data will participants be willing to share with the NIH? How often will they be willing to share information about themselves? Or will participants be interested at all to share their data with the NIH?

Wearables replicate biological functions

Wearable technology could one day change how we live in ways never before imagined.

Living Mushtari is a project completed by the Mediated  Matter Group in collaboration with Stratasys as part of the Wanderers collection of the MIT Media Labs. The project was direct by architect and designer Neri Oxman and consists of 3D printed wearables designed to function as a microbial factory that utilizes synthetic biology to convert sunlight into useful products for the wearer. The wearables feature internal fluid channels where two organisms, a photosynthetic microbe that is able to convert sunlight into sucrose, and a compatible microbe which consumes the sucrose and convert it into materials such as pigments, drugs, food and scents.

The wearables include a corset that is modeled after the digestive system to create sucrose to feed the wearer, and other designs that create calcium that strengthens bones and emit fluorescent photons that can light up a dark room.

The project is still a mere concept, but Oxman is hopeful that this will lead to more research.

Image source: Turquoise Ltd.